


Holding It Together

by WretchedArtifact



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Force-Sensitive Finn (Star Wars), Missing Scene, Movie: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-19 06:15:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22239913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WretchedArtifact/pseuds/WretchedArtifact
Summary: The war doesn't end with the Battle of Exegol. The war ends when Rey decides to come home.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey
Comments: 14
Kudos: 142
Collections: Holly Poly 2019





	Holding It Together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rubynye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/gifts).



In the years to come, people across the world would disagree about the exact moment the war ended. Some said it ended at the Battle of Exegol, when the planet-killing Sith ships fell from the sky. Others said it ended when the last of the First Order forces were defeated, their scattered, leaderless troops finally succumbing to either skirmish or surrender.

But Finn knew the true moment the war ended was four hours after the decisive battle, when the exhausted Resistance forces returned to Ajan Kloss to bandage their wounds and bed down for the night. Their quarters on the _Tantive IV_ had been damaged in battle, and no one had the energy to make them habitable again, so they dragged out mats and blankets and slept wherever there was room: on the floor of the cave, in the cockpits of their fighters, on the damp, humid soil outside. One by one they dropped into sleep, full of disbelief and wonder, under a sky of peaceful stars.

Except Rey. She had retreated back to the corner of the cave where she kept her Jedi relics, and Finn watched from a distance as she moved around, picking things up, wrapping them in cloth. Finally Poe came over and hooked his arm around Finn's shoulders and dragged him outside. "Let her do her thing," Poe said. "It's been a long day."

Technically the two of them were at the top of the command chain, but by the time they settled down to sleep, they'd been left with the muddiest, most unappealing spot on the ground outside. Their sleeping mats squished into the wet soil unpleasantly as they lay down on them. "Great," Finn said. "This is what peace gets us?"

"Hardly seems worth it, right?" Poe said. He didn't make any pretense of sticking to his own mat: he shoved his pillow right next to Finn's and settled in close, lying on his side, wrapping one arm tight around Finn's midsection. It was a familiar position--they'd been sleeping like that for months now, on nights when it was just the two of them--but it was a lot less comfortable on the uneven soil. Finn held onto Poe's wrist anyway, in case he had any thoughts of taking his arm back, and the two of them lapsed into silence as their bodies slowly settled against each other.

The next time Poe spoke, it was soft, meant only for Finn's ears. "I kinda don't want to sleep," he said. "I keep thinking we're gonna wake up in the morning and everything will have gone back to the way it was."

Finn had the same nebulous fear sitting in the pit of his stomach. Once the adrenaline rush of victory had faded, doubt had crept in quietly to take its place. The idea of waking up to a world that _wasn't_ at war seemed almost impossible to contemplate.

But even if they wanted to stay awake, there was no way they'd be able to do it. It had been one _hell_ of a long day. "No way," Finn said instead, with a firmness that he thought sounded convincing. "It's over. We won. No take-backs."

He felt the low vibration of Poe's laugh against his shoulder, and then Poe's lips pressed against that same spot, firm and warm. "Easy as that, huh?" Poe said. "I've always liked the way you think, Finn."

They lay there in the quiet for a few minutes more, until Finn heard the subtle shift in Poe's breathing that meant he had fallen asleep. Finn lifted his head to look at the cave, but from this angle he couldn't see Rey's alcove, or the sight of her bobbing hair buns as she moved around. He wanted to wait for her, but his hold on consciousness was rapidly slipping away. His head hadn't even settled back on the pillow before sleep caught him sideways, and he was gone.

* * *

Finn didn't have the vocabulary to describe what he felt when Kijimi fell. Not what he felt when he was told about it--what he felt when it _fell_. It was like there was an observant part inside of him that was always floating like a buoy in the sea, and all at once the sea level dropped, and with a vertiginous rush his awareness plunged and _cracked_ against the shallow surface of the water. That observant part of him was cloudy and untrained, and he sometimes had trouble deciphering what it perceived, but there was no mistaking the destructive force and unspeakable magnitude of what had just happened.

He felt it again now, under the smothering lid of sleep: the plunge, the crack, the dreadful realization. It was stomach-churning; it made the joy of their victory seem thin and feeble in his memory.

But then it went away. For a moment, Finn floated in peaceful stillness, and then he felt his consciousness rush upward, back towards himself. He was being guided by something welcome and familiar: the touch of a hand against his cheek. He recognized the gentle roughness of Rey's callused fingertips, and he hauled himself into awareness, opening his eyes to see her.

She was leaning down over him, her pillow and sleeping mat in hand. "Is there room for me here?" she whispered.

"Of course," Finn mumbled, sleepy and tongue-tied. "Our mud is your mud."

She dropped the mat onto the ground with a squelch and sat down gingerly, making a face as she sank down half an inch. She reached behind her head to undo her hair buns, and Finn watched her go through the familiar motions with tired relief. There was a smudge on her cheek, and in the dim light he couldn't tell if it was dirt, blood, or engine grease. It was usually one of those three. He gave the pad of his thumb a lick and reached out toward her.

Despite the stress of the day, her finely honed Jedi senses didn't fail her. "Ew, not with spit!" she said, batting his hand away. "Just show me where it is, and I'll do it."

So he pointed at her cheek, and she rubbed the smudge away with the cloth wrapped around her arm. She had a little smile on her face, but she also had that furrow between her brows that she always got when they teased each other: part humor, part steely competitiveness. It was funny how ordinary it all seemed, as if tonight were any other night. As if they hadn't just defeated evil, and won a war.

As if her life hadn't blinked out of existence for a moment, vanishing from Finn's mind just as surely as Kijimi had.

Rey unpinned the last bun and gingerly set her head back on her pillow. "I thought you might sleep in the cave," Finn said. She did that sometimes, falling asleep over one of those inscrutable Jedi texts.

"There's a _lot_ of snoring in that cave right now," Rey said.

Her voice was light, and on any other day he would've laughed, but not today. Today he couldn't stop the words from tumbling fast and painful out of his mouth. "I thought we might wake up in the morning and you'd be gone," Finn said.

The little smile on Rey's face faded. She tipped her head sideways to look at him, her face luminous in the sea of her loose dark hair. "Where would I go?" she asked softly.

"I don't know," Finn said. "It looked like you were packing up your things."

"Not to leave," she said. "I was just...tidying."

Finn's face twisted up skeptically. "I was!" Rey protested. Her hand slipped across the gap between their sleeping mats, and when he clasped it, she squeezed him tight. "I was tidying and...saying thank you."

"To who?"

"All of them," she said. "The Jedi." Her eyes lifted, looking up at the starry sky. "I've been reaching out to them for so long, and today they finally came for me. I had no hope--I was watching your ships fall out of the sky--and they gave me strength. They saved me."

She had only talked about what happened on the surface of Exegol in fragments, kaleidoscopic and nightmarish. But the look on her face just then was calm. "You felt the Jedi?" Finn asked. "In the Force?"

"I heard them," Rey said. "Their voices. Their presence."

And for a moment she seemed to move away from him: not physically, but inside herself. He thought he could almost feel it, the way her awareness suffused out over that shifting sea, streaking past him with a speed he could never hope to match. She was so strong, so practiced, and he was just--

Finn cleared his throat. "Rey," he said. "There's something I've really been meaning to tell you."

With startling quickness, her attention coalesced back inside herself, like a rubber band snapping back. "Is it what you were going to tell me back on Pasaana?" she asked, an unexpected eagerness in her voice.

"Yes."

The arm around Finn's midsection shifted. "Finally," came Poe's rusty voice. "The suspense has been killing me."

Oh, of _course_ he'd pick that moment to wake up. Finn jabbed his elbow back against Poe's hip. "Go back to sleep, nosy," he said.

"Easier to do if my pillow wasn't talking," Poe said. His arm around Finn squeezed. "You want me to go and give you guys some privacy?"

Finn sighed. "No," he said, and he jostled Poe back a few inches so he could lay down flat on his back. At that angle he could see both of them: their tired faces, their mussed hair, the exact same gossipy little light in their eyes. The two of them were so alike, sometimes. "It's just..." Finn said. "I can feel it now, too. The Force."

For a second Rey just blinked at him--and then her eyebrows lifted with genuine surprise. She hadn't realized it. "I didn't know if it was really what I was feeling, at first," Finn said. "But after today, I know it for sure. It's like I'm tuning a radio through the static, and sometimes it's all a blur, but sometimes something will...catch. And I feel it."

Where Rey's eyebrows had gone high, Poe's had gone low. "Wait," he said. "That was the big secret? I already knew that."

Rey and Finn both stared at him. "You did not," Finn said, feeling almost indignant. "I never told you about that."

"You didn't have to tell me," Poe said. "For the last month and a half you've been doing that same thing Leia always does, where you lift your head and stare off into nothing." He did an impression of it: head tilted oddly, eyes and face squinched up.

"Okay, I _definitely_ don't look like that when I do it," Finn groused.

Rey looked back and forth between them. "I've never seen him do it," she said.

"I don't think he does it as much when you're around," Poe said. "I just assumed it was a thing you guys did when you were apart. Keeping Force tabs on each other, or whatever."

Rey looked at Finn again. And this time, to his surprise, he saw her eyes had gone wet, glimmering in the dull light. "Oh," Finn said. "You're...you're not happy?"

"I'm--" She inhaled shakily. "Why couldn't I _tell?_ I'm with you every day."

Finn felt faint tension rise up in Poe's body where it was pressed up against his side. Because she _was_ with them, but it wasn't every day, and it hadn't been in months. And even when she was there, there always seemed to be a piece of her missing: a preoccupation that made her stay up all night with her Jedi texts and isolate herself in endless meditation.

"You've had bigger things on your mind, I guess," Finn said. "You were trying to reach out to all the dead Jedi, weren't you? Of course you're not going to notice my little blip on the radar."

That didn't seem to make her feel better: Finn could see the lines of tension deepening on her face, the skin laddering on her forehead. "What did you feel today?" she whispered.

And now he _knew_ he was sensing her awareness shift, because he could feel the strong reverberations of her memory as she thought back over the tragedies that had punctuated the last twenty-four hours. It was almost like she had pulled a curtain open in her mind and was showing them to him on a stage: he felt her go through the pitch and fall of Kijimi, the hushed inhale of Leia's passing, the slicing fire of the attack on the Resistance fleet. "Yeah," he said. "All of those."

Rey's glimmering eyes widened. "Can you show me?" she asked.

And while he couldn't explain how he knew what to do, he fumblingly found himself doing it: gathering up those weak, cloudy impressions of the same events and pushing them back towards her. He saw her experience them: Kijimi, Leia, the lightning arcing through the sky, and then--

Rey inhaled, her breath cracking in her throat with a sound of distress. Because he had kept going, past the lightning, to that terrible moment when her light had snuffed out. "You--" she said faintly.

"Yeah," Finn said. His tongue felt dry in his mouth. "I think I lost track of you for a couple of minutes, there."

Rey blinked at him wordlessly, and he saw the tears in her eyes separate out on her eyelashes and spill over. The sight of the wet tracks down her cheeks activated something painfully familiar inside Finn--the urge to reach out for her--but for the first time in a long time, he didn't have to. In that instant Rey came to him instead, sliding forward on the mat and crushing herself into his arms.

The feeling almost knocked the wind out of him. He had missed her _so much_ : the weight of her against him, her breath coming quick and hot against the fabric of his shirt. Against his side, Poe pressed closer, leaning over to stroke Rey's hair, and the feeling of both of them started to ease something inside Finn that had rusted up tight over the last few months. It wasn't just that the three of them were together again, and safe. It was that he could _see_ her now, with that bobbing, observant eye inside him. For so long she had been inscrutable to him, her heart armored over, and he hadn't been sure she wanted to stay.

But he knew it now. He could feel it.

Poe's fingers dipped underneath Rey's loose hair, his fingers starting to rub gentle circles against her scalp. "I can't say I'm following all of this," he said, and his voice was light and easy. "But he lost track of you, huh? Where did you go?"

Rey was silent for a few moments, her face still pressed against Finn's shirt. Then: "Away," she said quietly.

And Poe couldn't know what she meant by that, but the hushed pain in her voice seemed to speak the truth for her. _Away._ Beyond where an ordinary man like Poe could reach; beyond where a novice like Finn could ever hope to bring her back. Finn felt a slight flinch in Poe's muscles, but Poe didn't let it communicate out to where he was touching Rey. He dipped his hand down to massage the base of her neck, and Finn felt Rey shift, leaning into the press of Poe's hand. It always surprised Finn how differently Poe could shape his love: with Finn he was brash, confident, full of physical affection, and with Rey he was small, intimate, carefully navigating around the spines of their prickly exteriors to get to the softness underneath.

"Well," Poe said, his voice still light. "You came back, right?"

The nod Rey gave was so tiny Finn almost missed it. "You came back," Finn said. "And then you came back _here."_

Rey turned her head, resting her cheek on Finn's chest so they could see her tired, tear-stained face. "Of course I did," she said. "I came _home_."

Over their heads, the twin moons of Ajan Kloss shone down on them from their staggered midnight orbit. At some point between sleeping and waking, the day had turned over into a new one. It was the first day of their new reality, and lying there, sandwiched between Poe and Rey, Finn felt the last of the lingering doubts inside him fade away. Rey had come back to them. The war was over.

They had won.

"Well," Poe said doubtfully, "I guess this is _home_ , loosely speaking. It's kind of a muddy shithole, at the moment."

It was only thanks to Rey's weight pinning him down that Finn didn't jab Poe with his elbow again. Rey laughed rustily, wiping at her eyes. "Oh, you're exasperating," she said. "I didn't mean Ajan Kloss. I meant _you_."

"She _obviously_ meant us," Finn said. "You really know how to kill a moment, don't you?"

Poe settled back down on his side, reaching over with his arm so he could wrap it over both of them. He pulled them in closer, and Rey snaked out her arm to wrap it around Poe's waist, and lying there between them Finn could feel his heart soaking up them both, until it was as saturated and full as a sponge.

"I love you guys too," Poe said.


End file.
